ART GUIDE

Published: June 11, 1999

Here is a selective listing by critics of The Times of new or noteworthy art, design and photography exhibitions at New York City museums and art galleries this weekend. Addresses, unless otherwise noted, are in Manhattan. Most galleries are closed on Sundays and Mondays, but hours vary and should be checked by telephone. Gallery admission is free.

* denotes a highly recommended show.

Museums

''THE AMERICAN CENTURY: ART AND CULTURE, 1900-1950,'' Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3676 (through Aug. 22). This is the first half of a marathon end-of-an-era survey. (Part 2, covering 1950-2000, opens on Sept. 26.) It flows chronologically through four floors of the museum's galleries, resulting in a show of substantial if circumscribed pleasures. Most of the 600 paintings, drawings and sculptures are familiar icons from a canonical art history, one in need of shaking up. But if what is here is short on fresh insights, there are wonderful things to look at. And by the time you've worked your way from Gilded Age society portraits on the top floor to Jackson Pollock below, you've had a genuine time-travel experience: exhausting, diverting, sometimes moving, even pride-inspiring. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Thursdays, 1 to 8 P.M. Admission: $12.50; $10.50, students and the elderly (Holland Cotter).

''COLLECTING IN DEPTH: DRAWINGS BY GROSZ, SCHWITTERS, ERNST AND KLEE,'' Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, (212) 708-9400, (through July 20). While a little on the dry side, this exhibition effectively encapsulates the careers of four major German modernists, layering their sensibilities like a sandwich and demonstrating the singular uses that each artist found for Cubism. For the outer layers, George Grosz and Paul Klee reformed the tensile lines and transparencies of Analytic Cubism for the purposes, respectively, of scathing social satire and psychologically charged fusions of fantasy and form. In between, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst took innovations of Synthetic Cubist collage into new territory. Schwitters used the detritus of everyday life to create a streetwise formalism that indexed different kinds of social interaction and human contact. Ernst extracted found images from their natural habitat in the public press to create a universe as fully imaged as Klee's, only scarier. Hours: Saturdays through Tuesdays, and Thursdays, 10:30 A.M. to 5:45 P.M.; Fridays, to 8:15 P.M. Admission: $9.50; $6.50, students and the elderly (Roberta Smith).

''FROM CEZANNE TO VAN GOGH: THE COLLECTION OF DR. GACHET,'' Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Aug. 15). A show of works from the collection of a homeopathic physician and amateur painter named Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909). He was one of those curious figures of French bohemia, an intimate of Courbet, Champfleury and Baudelaire and later a friend to painters like Monet, van Gogh and Cezanne, whose works he collected when they were still unrecognized. Some of these works are great, others are so bad that doubts have been raised about their authenticity. Any show that invites you to contemplate the difference between fake van Goghs and poor van Goghs is, as you might expect, not altogether visually thrilling. But it has an instructive value as an exercise in comparative viewing, and this is not negligible. Hours: Sundays, and Tuesdays through Thursdays, 9:30 A.M. to 5:15 P.M.; Fridays and Saturdays, to 8:45 P.M. Suggested admission: $10; $5, students and the elderly (Michael Kimmelman).

''IMPRESSIONISTS IN WINTER: EFFETS DE NEIGE,'' Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000 (through Aug. 29.) Think of the Impressionists and chances are you think green: lawns, hedges and fertile fields of a deciduous nature caught at full leaf. But these artists were year-round workers, and winter landscapes, rendered in the frosty open air or through the glass of a studio window, figured in their repertory. This exhibition brings together some 60 such paintings. Its size is untaxing and its deep-freeze images of snow-covered fields and ice-caked trees are the visual equivalent of air-conditioning. Of course much of the work by Monet, Pissaro, Sisley and their colleagues is extremely beautiful in that immediate, you-have-to-be-there Impressionist way. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Thursdays, to 8 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 A.M. to 6 P.M. (to 11 P.M. on the first Saturday of each month). Admission: $4; $2, students over 12; $1.50, the elderly (Cotter).

MARY LUCIER, ''FLOODSONGS,'' Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, (212) 708-9400 (through June 20). An aural and visual environment dealing with the 1997 flood that brought havoc to Grand Forks, N.D. Ms. Lucier, a video artist, blends images of the devastation with spoken accounts of its effects. On a huge projection screen, views of the